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EUGENE ROBINSON: Where Macondo came alive

Sentinel & Enterprise

Updated:
04/23/2014 08:33:39 AM EDT

Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos, left, and Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto, stand next the urn containing the ashes of the late Colombian Nobel Literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, pictured above, during the author's homage at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City on Monday. Garcia Marquez, known throughout Latin American and much of the world simply as "Gabo," lived in Mexico for decades and wrote some of his best-known works here, included the renowned "100 Years of Solitude." He died Thursday in Mexico City at age 87.
AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo

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Years before I met him, Gabriel Garcia Marquez changed my life.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" gave me a new way of looking at the world. Reading his masterpiece was like stepping through a portal into a Technicolor reality where the streets are paved with metaphor and the air is fragrant with dreams.

Garcia Marquez, who died Thursday at 87, was my introduction to modern Latin American literature. I wanted more.

When I got a Nieman fellowship at Harvard -- a year off to study anything I wanted -- the first thing I did was sign up for a literature course taught by the great Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. I took a Spanish-language course. I enrolled in a Latin American history course.

Midway through the academic year, I learned that The Washington Post's South America bureau was coming open. I had prepared myself for the job -- accidentally -- and so instead of returning to Washington in the summer of 1988, I moved with my family to Buenos Aires.

In four years of crisscrossing the continent, I felt as if Garcia Marquez were my constant companion. The name of the fictional town where "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is set -- Macondo -- became shorthand for the bizarre, magical-realist things that happened all the time in Latin America but seemingly nowhere else.

One example from the heart of cosmopolitan Buenos Aires: Two women are walking side by side down the street. For no particular reason, they change places.

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High above, a dog falls from an apartment balcony and lands on one woman's head, killing her. A pedestrian crossing the street sees the fatal accident, is understandably distracted and gets run over by a bus. An elderly man who witnesses the entire sequence of events clutches his chest and falls dead of a heart attack.

Macondo.

I especially thought of Garcia Marquez during reporting trips to Colombia, where he was known by the nickname "Gabo." I wanted to meet him but he was never around -- he lived in Mexico City and visited his homeland infrequently. Unrelenting violence involving drug traffickers, leftist guerrillas, paramilitary groups and the Colombian armed forces meant that my forays into the countryside had to be brief.

I was settled back in Washington when, in 1995, I got a phone call from Maria Jimena Duzan, a brave columnist for El Espectador, the newspaper where Garcia Marquez once worked. She said a group of American journalists was being invited to take a tour of the Colombian drug industry. I told her no thanks. She said she understood, but I might want to reconsider because "the tour guide is Gabo."

I flew down.

One stop was Itagui prison near Medellin, where a cellblock had been modified to comfortably house the three Ochoa brothers -- pioneering drug traffickers who surrendered in exchange for light sentences. This is from the story I wrote:

"In addition to offering conversation, the Ochoas offered lunch -- ground beef, rice, beans, avocado and pork rinds. There, around two long tables in the exercise area, sat eight American journalists, three acknowledged drug czars, the drug czars' attorney, and novelist and Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. ... All were being served food by a former paramilitary marauder, who asked if anyone wanted more beans."

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